Essential Dictionary of Global Studies

Direction: Fabrice d’Almeida, José Eduardo Franco

Presentation

Global Studies, which are significantly expanding today, are constructing an epistemological field that will allow the delineation of an emerging disciplinary area we can call globalogy.

Globalogy, in general definition, is a science that seeks to understand the world in the process of globalization, in its history, and the complexity of the current state of the world. It is characterized by the movements of exchanges and interactions among human communities spread across the planet Earth, which have generated and continue to generate interrelations, mutual influences, and metamorphoses on various levels (cultural, economic, political, religious, social, etc.).

This globalizing movement, facilitated and accelerated recently by the exponential development of information technologies and transportation, has brought about an increasingly acute awareness that human beings are integrated into a world of planetary dimensions. This world needs to be better understood within a broader totality sensitive to its interactions, although always from the perspective of its local presence in the world. This means that one’s understanding of the world will always be “glocal,” determined by the reality in which one was born, raised, and shaped their identity. In essence, the global is a composite reality, integrating the multitude of locales and their interactions.

Global Studies aim to examine the global in its metamorphic relationship with the local and vice versa. It is a science in the sense that it seeks to understand but can associate with technique if this effort of understanding can link to the need to establish goals to create instruments of intervention to enhance what we can call the “global field” in its various problematic dimensions and the relationship between the human environment and the natural or social environment.

This dictionary project aims to systematize essential knowledge about Global Studies and to assess the state of the art regarding the major themes and issues in this emerging epistemological field. The Essential Dictionary of Global Studies will be developed under the auspices of the UNESCO/CIPSH Chair of Global Studies and the new Center for Global Studies at the Open University (Universidade Aberta), in conjunction with the Doctoral Program in Global Studies and the Doctoral Program in Social Sustainability and Development at the Open University. It will be closely partnered with the University of Paris-Panthéon-Assas, with potential collaboration from other national and international academic institutions.